Incunabula

This refers to printed material from Europe prior to the 1500s. (It’s the plural form; the singular is “incunabule.”)

The etymology is from a Latin word meaning “swaddling clothes,” which refers to the “infancy” of printing during this period. (Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1430s.)

Dictionary.com offers an alternate, more generalized definition:

the earliest stages or first traces of anything.

In this sense, it reminds me of Antediluvian, which literally means a time period before the Great Flood of the Old Testament, but has come to mean, simply, something very old.

Why I Looked It Up

I think it came up a lot in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Then, in Conspiracies and Secret Societies, it was used to identify the inner circle of participants in the secretive Bilderberg Meetings.

Postscript

From Once Upon a Tome:

With a smile that did not reach his eyes, he began to shed books everywhere, in a determined fashion that didn’t brook arguments. As he did so, he launched into a breathless diatribe about how important these incunabula were…

Postscript

From On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History:

A recognized authority on incunabula – books printed before 1501…